Reliability in Post-Disaster Networks: A Novel Interference-Mitigation Strategy

We hereby present a novel interference mitigation strategy specifically designed to enhance the quality of service that a typical terrestrial user equipment (UE) would experience after the occurrence of a calamity. In particular, we devise a novel stochastic geometry framework where the functioning ground base stations are modeled as an inhomogeneous Poisson point process, and promote proper silencing as an effective solution to improve both coverage and reliability (which is usually overlooked in emergency scenarios); in particular, the latter is evaluated by means of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) meta distribution performance metric. The derived downlink performances assume Rayleigh fading conditions for all wireless links. The numerical results show insightful trends in terms of both average coverage probability (which is optimized by choosing the best area for applying the silencing strategy) and SINR meta distribution, depending on: distance of the UE from the disaster epicenter (henceforth intended as the center of the area where the BS can be damaged), disaster radius (also referring to the latter area), and quality of resilience of the terrestrial network. The aim of this paper is therefore to prove the effectiveness of proper silencing in emergency scenarios, at least from the coverage and reliability perspectives.